Office pooping: Is it the last taboo for women at work?

Shortly after crushing your morning coffee at the office, it starts: That rumble-in-the-Bronx, the growl of your intestines working their magic, moving things southbound.

If you’re a man, you may be so cavalier as to tuck a newspaper or magazine under your arm and stroll towards the company throne.

But if you’re a woman, you may be one of the many for whom that gut roiling spurs panic, or at very least a mental strategic planning session as to how this business can be taken care of as discreetly as possible.

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In a widely shared article on the Daily Beast, posted Monday, writer Laura Dimon revived the debate by sort of oddly using the news peg of Sheryl Sandberg’s new beststeller Lean In, which encourages women to shed that anxiety about getting ahead and just make it happen.

Sure, women are making their moves towards the corner office, the subhead for the story titled ‘The Last Office Taboo for Women: Doing Your Business at Work’ proclaims. “But there’s one place where they’re still wracked with anxiety and shame.”

The lengths women go to to avoid crapper detection are many, the Beast article reads: One woman in New York City takes her BlackBerry with her to the can and sends emails to provide herself an ‘alibi’ — because of course, one can only send email from her desk these days. An unnamed female host of a popular American morning show confesses to walking 10 minutes (10 minutes!) to another part of her office building in order to drop the kids off at the pool. Gawker, of course, gleefully created a guessing game as to which show host this could possibly be.

New York Magazine’s The Cut marvelled over the contortionist skills of Jill, a 28-year-old NYC transplant from Vancouver who told the Daily Beast that if she cannot avoid going to the bathroom at work, she hoists her feet off the ground and props them against the side of the stall to avoid the “chance that the person next to me would recognize my shoes and forever hold in their heads that I was the girl” dropping a bomb in the ladies’ room.

“How is that even possible? Wouldn’t the angle and leverage be all wrong? I’m picturing Jill pooping like a ping-pong show,” writes The Cut’s Maureen O’Connor. “Her effort is unnecessary: Nobody peeks under the edge of a stall to identify a pooping woman by her shoes. Nobody.”

It is okay to poop at work. Nobody is judging you. Nobody cares

But a new Canadian survey on bowel health suggests that ladies’ room anxiety is, in fact, very real.

The national survey of more than 1,000 Canadian women found that while the majority acknowledge the importance of bowel health, a whopping 71% admitted to going to great lengths to avoid defecating — especially in a public washroom.

Conducted the week of Feb. 28th to March 7th on behalf of Vision Critical and funded by Janssen Inc., the survey found almost half of women (46%) agree they have avoided going in a public washroom, and over 40% have waited until the bathroom was vacant. Forty-five percent of women reported feeling embarrassed to have a bowel movement in a public washroom and 23% have — like that anonymous morning show host — found a ‘room of one’s own’ on another floor of their office building.

The Cut, of course, does not wish to leave readers with a sense of shame. For all those anonymous stall-avoiders — there is hope.